Preface xiiianalysis to show how male dress in the nineteenth century gave rise to
the figure of the dandy. The social need for the aristocracy to distinguish
itself from the bourgeoisie led to the widespread use of the ‘detail’ to
provide this ‘distinction’. But dandy fashion was also an attempt to
radically mark out the individual from the common, an early example of
individuals wanting to show that they had thought about their clothing.
Barthes then considers how modernity and democratization in fashion
have served to undermine the impact of the dandy, by making radical
fashion statements into a regulated market. only women’s fashion
nowadays has the range—but not the social function—of the detail;
fashion, concludes Barthes, has killed off dandyism.
In the wake of these ‘systematizing’ pieces on gemstones and
dandyism, and following his research set out in ‘“Blue is in Fashion
This year”’, Barthes drafted an early preface to The Fashion System
(written probably in 1963 but only published posthumously in the Swiss
journal [VWA]). as an early (first?) draft of the preface to The Fashion
System, the piece displays significantly different emphases from the
final published version of the preface. Though taken from a manuscript
and very occasionally unfinished, this early preface is useful particularly
given that there has been, up until now, a real gap in seeing how Barthes
developed his method between ‘Blue is in Fashion This year’ in 1960 and
The Fashion System in 1967 (and a gap to which he refers in the article).
The early preface is surprisingly candid, especially concerning the gains
made by semiology, on the differences between the semiological and
the sociological project in fashion analysis, on the importance for the
study of fashion language of andré martinet’s ‘pertinence principle’ in
linguistics, and on the notion of ‘totality’ in clothing research. It finishes
with a very frank ‘autocritique’ of Barthes’s own project so far and the
results produced, suggesting that semiology has within it the seeds of
other forms of research into clothing and fashion. This second section
of the book ends with three interviews, including a little-known round-
table discussion with henri Lefebvre and Jean Duvignaud, which is
wide-ranging and indicative of three parallel but antagonistic critical
theories of fashion.
By the time of the publication of The Fashion System in 1967,
Barthes’s name was firmly established as a major theorist of fashion
in France. his theories are quoted and sought in a number of
different places. The final part of this anthology, Fashion Debates and